The article offers a personal recollection of Barbara Harlow and her impact on the author’s intellectual development. Harlow’s book Barred: women, writing, and political detention (1992) and her later writings on the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay are revisited for their contemporary significance. The author situates Harlow as a unique literary critic whose sustained work was conjunctural reading, translating and writing across geopolitical and disciplinary borders; her interventions being made in commitment to her honed liberatory agendas and visions.
Timothy Brennan, ‘An appreciation of Barbara Harlow’, 2February2017, Institute of Race Relations, London, available at www.irr.org.uk/news/an-appreciation-of-barbara-harlow/. It’s worth recalling that before Harlow published Resistance Literature in 1987, her first monograph, she had translated Jacques Derrida’s Spurs: Nietzsche’s styles/Eperons: les styles de Nietzsche in 1979 for the University of Chicago Press.
3.
Wahneema Lubiano is Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Duke University. Ann Cvetkovich is the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
4.
Barbara’s legacy included something like fifty pairs of billowing hand-made trousers that were her signature sartorial style. As these are likely over thirty-five years old, we might consider them historic items with a place in her larger archive. This might be especially apt given Barbara’s delight at finding that Ruth First listed the dry cleaning, the shoe repair and other domestic chores next to research, writing and political tasks in her ‘To Do’ notebooks. See Harlow, ‘Looked class, talked red’, in this issue of Race & Class 60, no. 3 (2019).
5.
AmilcarCabral, ‘National Liberation and Culture’, in Return to the Source: selected speeches by Amilcar Cabral, edited by Africa Information Service (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), p. 43.
6.
HassanSalah D., ‘Radical revisions: Barbara Harlow in the conjuncture’, in this issue of Race & Class60, no. 3 (2019).
7.
BarbaraHarlow, Barred: women, writing and political detention (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), p. 14.
8.
BarbaraHarlow, ‘Prison memoirs of political detainees’, in Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987), quotes at pp. 120, 128.
9.
Harlow, Barred, pp. xix, 136.
10.
Harlow, Barred, p. xii. In my view, the ‘late style’ identified by Hosam Aboul-Ela in ‘Methods for a neoliberal order’ in this volume (60, no. 3) begins with Barred’s last section and chapter, ‘Writing Human Rights’ with its analysis of the genre of the human rights report, with its particular combination of ‘documentation and intervention’, p. 244.
11.
Harlow, Barred, p. xiii.
12.
Harlow, Barred, p. 12. This precise point has recently been made about the relationship between high school and prison by Damien M. Sojoyner in his compelling book First Strike: educational enclosures in Black Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
See Avery F. Gordon, ‘the other door, it’s flood of tears with consolation enclosed’, in Ghostly Matters: haunting and the sociological imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997 and 2008).
16.
Harlow, Barred, p. ix.
17.
DylanRodriguez, Forced Passages: imprisoned radical intellectuals and the U.S. prison regime (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). See Chapters 2 and 3, especially pp. 80, 108–09, 136.
18.
AveryF. Gordon, ‘Methodologies of imprisonment’, PMLA 123, no. 3 (May2008); ‘The prisoner’s curse’, HermanGrayMacarenaGomez-Barris, eds, Toward a Sociology of the Trace (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 17–55.
19.
Harlow, Resistance Literature, p. 129.
20.
BarbaraHarlow, After Lives: legacies of revolutionary writing (London: Verso, 1996), p. 153.
21.
Harlow, After Lives, p. 123.
22.
BarbaraHarlow, ‘Resistance literature revisited: from Basra to Guantánamo’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics32 (2012), p. 13.
